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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22645777">but you'd need enough candles to start a house fire</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorteLise/pseuds/MorteLise'>MorteLise</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>RWBY</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Awkwardness, Birthday Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, cloqwork zine, shenanigans and fluff</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 01:33:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,697</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22645777</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorteLise/pseuds/MorteLise</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Qrow tries to step up his game for Ozpin’s birthday, but a mid-life crisis is probably the not the best present.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Qrow Branwen/Ozpin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>46</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>but you'd need enough candles to start a house fire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My entry to the cloqwork zine! Only posted a smidge late, as is my custom.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Happy birthday,” Qrow announced, unceremoniously dropping an over-iced chocolate cupcake on Ozpin’s desk. “Big 4-0, right? Congrats on officially getting old.”</p><p>He’d caught Ozpin working late in his office, which would’ve seemed more respectable if he hadn’t known for a fact Oz was just getting through all the backlogged administrative work he’d spent the week avoiding so Glynda wouldn’t murder him with her stilettos on Monday.</p><p>Ozpin stared at the cupcake with the blank, bleary-eyed incomprehension of someone who’d burned out a few hours ago, then called up the calendar on his desk array, stared at the date, and frowned.</p><p>“Oh,” he said, and Qrow was left with the all-too-familiar feeling that he’d just screwed up.</p><p>Not surprising. He just wished he knew how—he thought he’d gotten a handle on birthdays since Yang and Ruby were born. And after that legal drinking age bullshit (seriously, why bother), round numbers were the only milestones worth celebrating, right?</p><p>He could’ve done better with the delivery, probably. For some reason he thought that’d be funny.</p><p>“How did you know?” Ozpin asked, like the general information for Beacon Academy’s prodigy headmaster wouldn’t be public fucking knowledge.</p><p>Actually it wasn’t. Sure, Oz’s biography after he’d rocketed his way through his studies and right into a staff position was probably accurate (minus a divine reincarnation and ancient conspiracy or two), but the background he’d applied with was the kind of carefully constructed smokescreen that only held up under superficial administrative scrutiny (especially with the inner circle stacking the deck for him) and not so much the determined investigation of two paranoid teenage bandit spies with equally fake credentials.</p><p>Changing a birthday seemed like overkill. But then if anyone had the time, spite, and resources to hunt down a guy’s former life and loved ones based on just a date of birth, it’d be Salem.</p><p>Qrow shrugged. “Today’s chocolate cupcake day,” he said. “Sure, could’ve been a few things that made it special, but I saw you sneak a candle a couple times too.”</p><p>Ozpin’s eyes widened slightly in realization, then dropped to his desk. The frown was still there.</p><p>Was that creepy? Maybe it was creepy. But also it was the kind of detail-oriented observation Qrow thought he’d been hired for, damn it, and they were a few months into their whatever-the-fuck relationship with benefits weirdness so he’d thought he should try doing more than just putting out and—okay yeah maybe combining those two things hadn’t been such a great idea.</p><p>“I uh, get if you want to keep it private,” Qrow said, and immediately a bunch of other potential problems occurred to him. “Or—shit, did I get the age wrong? Is this not that birthday? Does that stuff even matter to you anymore? Forty’s probably not even a drop in the bucket—”</p><p>“No, that’s—well admittedly your delivery was a little off-putting, but there was nothing wrong with—” Ozpin sighed and took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes. “I suppose I just thought I would’ve accomplished more by now.”</p><p>Qrow raised a nonplussed eyebrow and glanced around the clock tower office. “What, like opening your own bakery? Gonna fit in a start-up between running the school you founded, stopping Salem from murdering everybody for the last few millennia, and creating world harmony?”</p><p>That wasn’t a great look. Sarcasm was the wrong response, go figure.</p><p>Qrow was just acing today.</p><p>“I’ve done what I can to maintain the peace, in this life,” Ozpin said, dismissing his screens and keeping his glasses folded to the side. Although that might not have just been a mood thing, his eyes were starting to look a little bloodshot. He smiled tightly. “And I’m grateful that thus far it has been maintained, but even with the head start I was given in becoming headmaster so soon after graduation, it’s all amounted to just that: maintenance. My personal accomplishments are—lacking.”</p><p>Rude.</p><p>Qrow cleared his throat in mock-offense and gestured to himself with maybe one too many flourishes. “Can’t think of anything worth mentioning? Like, I dunno, maybe…”</p><p>Ozpin looked at him with a smile still too close to melancholy, the lack of glasses really driving home how vulnerable and drained and extremely goddamn nearsighted he was; actually did he catch any of the nuance there or was Qrow just a limb-flailing blur to him? “Yes, a high-cost investment with a fifty-percent success rate,” Oz said wryly, then winced and added, “That is to say—I’m very grateful to you and all the work you’ve done—”</p><p>“No, I get it,” Qrow said, and started wondering if maybe his Semblance had secretly been responsible for this whole idea in the first place. Oz could’ve had a quiet night of liquefying his brain with paperwork and it still would’ve been better than this.</p><p>With all those other lifetimes rattling around in Ozpin’s head (…soul?), he hadn’t thought forty would be such a big deal—</p><p>But why not? It would be to anyone else.</p><p>Qrow frowned, shifting gears, and really looked at Ozpin, who at this point was sipping away at a mug that’d probably gone from hot to room temperature a while ago in a game effort to avoid the conversation.</p><p>“So this is what a mid-life crisis looks like on you, huh?” he said as teasingly as he could, and caught the lightning flash of panicked tension in Ozpin’s posture that meant he’d scored a hit in Emotional Battleship.</p><p>(A game that remained handy years past when he’d invented it, but one that got less fun once he was less invested in figuring out what made Beacon’s enigmatic headmaster tick and more in what emotional guilt was weighing down his masochistic boss that day.)</p><p>Even if Ozpin’s legacy stretched longer than the name Remnant—and Oz was happy to trot that reminder out for anyone in the know when those inner circle meetings got rowdy—the studious, hot chocolate guzzling, insultingly tall man Qrow had reluctantly fallen for was, technically, forty years old today.</p><p>But that didn’t mean he wanted to be reminded about it.</p><p>“We all want to be somebody,” Ozpin said, just as the silence had stretched on too long and Qrow was scrambling for something to break it.  “I was just given a more literal opportunity to do so than most. Who I am...who I’ve become, rather—is owed to a legacy I wish I had contributed more to.” He sighed, expression still distressingly open without his glasses. “There’s a saying we—<em>I</em> have; both as a reassurance and a reminder.”</p><p>Qrow frowned and got comfortable leaning against the desk.</p><p>“This will not end with me,” Ozpin said, and a sharp pain lanced Qrow’s heart at just how damn sad his smile was. “I wasn’t the first, and I won’t be the last. So the question, then, becomes what I intend to leave to my successor. This job, this peace, the unity and network of skilled Huntsmen and Huntresses around the globe that the King of Vale put in place—if I could build on that, on using the maintained peace to make some new strides towards stopping Salem—”</p><p>“Great, sounds like a plan,” Qrow interrupted, leaving Oz’s lips half-parted on whatever came next in his self-pity fest, because that was enough of <em>that </em>already.</p><p>To Ozpin’s credit he got over his derailment pretty quickly, so if nothing else at least Qrow had dragged him out of his paperwork coma. “No, it doesn’t,” he corrected with practiced, just-barely-exasperated patience.</p><p>Qrow shrugged. “Checklist, then. Bucket list? Shit we need to work on.” He swept his arm over-dramatically and almost knocked over the cupcake. “You said this doesn’t end with you, but why the fuck not?”</p><p>Ozpin’s eyes met his for a brief, stricken second, and then slid away, and it didn’t take long for Qrow to catch the meaning.</p><p>He’s not the first person to say that.</p><p>Well, he’s gonna be the first to goddamn mean it.</p><p>“Qrow…” Ozpin said, his name a tired sigh, and Qrow took that as his cue to keep going.</p><p>“I mean I’m pretty sure Jimmy’s just waiting on you to send him the coordinates so he can go level the crap out of team evil with his fancy little ships,” and that got him something closer to a real smile, at least. Qrow reached out and took Ozpin’s hand. “We’ve come a long way already, right? So let’s take it as far as we can take it.”</p><p>Ozpin squeezed his hand. “I suppose that’s all we can do, isn’t it?”</p><p>A little noncommittal but eh, it was something.</p><p>“Forty’s not that old, Oz,” Qrow tried, and that did smooth out the stress lines around Oz’s brow a little better than the rest of it had. “You’ve got plenty of time.”</p><p>“Spoken like someone who’s begun feeling his age himself,” Oz replied with a sly smirk, which was just completely uncalled for—</p><p>But the wily bastard followed it up by dragging him forward for a kiss, and that was pretty hard to be mad about.</p><p>“You have time,” Qrow breathed between kisses, because it felt important that Ozpin know that for some reason.</p><p>“I have you,” Ozpin murmured back, and it was hard to say whether that was a deflection or just what he considered more important, but Qrow wasn’t going to parse that one out as he straddled the seat to settle in his lap—</p><p>Right on top of the cupcake, which had annoyingly, improbably, managed to roll a chocolate icing trail across the desk before making its way onto Ozpin’s lap during their makeout session. And now Qrow’s ass.</p><p>“That figures,” Qrow muttered, peeling off the flattened cake and chucking it in the trash.</p><p>“A shame,” Ozpin agreed, but didn’t sound that bothered as he swiped some of the frosting off his pants and nonchalantly licked it off his fingers. “In any case, I think that marks the end of my work for the evening. And I should do something about these pants before this stains…”</p><p>Good old—but not actually old—Oz, making the best of a bad situation.</p><p>Qrow smirked. “Need any help with that?”</p>
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